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NORTH POLE, Alaska  As I was driving through this town of less
than 1,600 people just outside of Fairbanks the other day, an
overwhelming sensation came over me  of safety. Or at least that's
what Congress wanted me to feel. Thanks to a senseless, but sadly
typical, formula for spending federal homeland security dollars,
North Pole has been awarded more than half a million dollars for
homeland security rescue and communications equipment. This just in
case the terrorists decide to try to shut down Santa Claus Lane.

Fortunately, I am in a position to make a frontline report  all
seems quiet.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is
irritating certain U.S. senators by insisting that how federal
homeland security spending is allocated should have some relation to
the risk of a terrorist attack in any given area. Where he has the
authority to act on his own, Chertoff has pushed his department
toward rationality. He moved, for instance, to limit the cities
eligible for port-security grants to 66 from 366, thus eliminating
Martha's Vineyard from the list (and exposing the extended Kennedy
clan to attack by terrorist yacht). But Congress controls how
homeland security grants are doled out to the states, and its
attitude is, "Unless we waste money, the terrorists will win."

Immediately after 9/11, Congress wrote a homeland security
spending formula into the Patriot Act, one of the provisions of that
law that actually is a mistake. It says that every state gets .75
percent of the funding from two enormous federal grant programs that
spend well over $1 billion a year. That eats up 40 percent of the
funding. The other 60 percent is allocated on the basis of
population, which is one risk factor for a terror attack, but only
one. In other words, in a homeland security effort that should be
built on intelligence and risk analysis, Congress has created a
system that is almost entirely random and beholden to the dictates
of logrolling and pork-barrel spending.

This is a boon not just to North Pole, but to places like
Wyoming. According to Veronique de Rugy of the American Enterprise
Institute, the Equality State has only .17 percent of the nation's
population, but gets .85 percent of federal homeland security
grants. That works out to $37.74 per capita for Wyoming, while New
York state gets $5.41 per capita. De Rugy reports that Washington,
D.C., is the only location that is both among the top 10 grant
recipients and on a list of the 10 most at-risk localities.

Throwing around money in absurd fashion has resulted in,
naturally enough, absurdities  $300,000 spent in Outagamie County,
Wis; $30,000 in Lake County, Tenn., to buy a defibrillator to have
on hand at high-school basketball games; $98,000 on training courses
in Lenawee County, Mich., which no one bothered to attend. And on it
goes. Billions of dollars in the grants haven't been spent on
anything because they are gummed up in the bureaucratic pipeline,
partly because some localities don't have the foggiest idea what to
do with the money.

The House recently passed a bill to rationalize the funding
formula, basing it almost entirely on risk-assessment by DHS. States
would have to submit applications for grant money to address
specific risks, and DHS would evaluate them accordingly. This is the
basic approach advocated by the 9/11 commission. But the Senate has
balked. Small-state senators have a disproportionate sway there, and
last week they rejected the House approach, preferring a barely
improved version of the status quo. These senators can't imagine any
reason for being in Washington other than to shove lucre back to
their home states  for whatever reason.

If Congress can't straighten out the funding formula, maybe it
will have to try a different approach, and relocate people, such as
moving people from threatened urban areas to places like North Pole.
We can be certain they would be well-secured here.

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